User:Eelkefolmer

International Game Developers Association

Eelke Folmer

Eelke Folmer is an assistant Professor at the University of Nevada in Reno. Previously he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta. He received his PhD degree from the University of Groningen where he worked on the European Union funded Software Architecture for Usability (STATUS) project.

Because the game industry has notoriously been plagued by expanding deadlines, escalating costs and a low chance of commercial success, his research in software engineering and human computer interaction tries to solve two research questions:

How can we sell more games?

Games seem to predominantly target the high end gamer. Many games are just too difficult to play, or to learn to play for inexperienced gamers. In addition, 10-20% of our population is excluded from playing games at all because many games are inaccessible to disabled gamers. At a time when game sales are the key to their survival it is strange that game developers do not try to include these groups of gamers. Eelke's research tries to capture the best practices with regard to game interaction design and describe them as interaction design patterns which can help game designer design games with a better support for usability and accessibility (see [1] / [2])

How can game development costs be lowered?

Rather then reinventing the wheel when developing a 3d or physics engine, game developers can reuse existing components. Component based development is the key to lowering costs and reducing development time. However, many game developers struggle with problems such as component integration, component selection and managing complexity in their game architectures. ---My research seeks to advance the current state of the art by developing a software architecture that more optimally supports component based game development & outlining strategies for component selection and integration.